After weeks of infighting, no one knows who’s in charge of the Michigan Republican Party.
Kristina Karamo, who was elected chairwoman last year, insists she still has the job, even after a sizable group of state party committee members voted to oust her this month. She refuses to leave the post, even as the opposition’s pick to replace her, former Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, issues statements under the state party logo declaring himself the chairman.
The leadership crisis has resulted in chaos and confusion in what’s expected to be a top battleground state for control of the White House and Senate in 2024.
The anti-Karamo faction has asked a court to settle the matter and on Wednesday received some validation from Republican National Committee lawyers, who said an initial review had determined that Karamo had been “properly removed.” But the RNC stopped short of recognizing Hoekstra as the new chair, saying neither he nor Karamo would be credentialed as a voting member at the national party’s winter meeting next week in Las Vegas.
“Following the RNC Winter Meeting, a body of RNC Members will move quickly to review this dispute and make such recommendation as they believe appropriate,” RNC chief counsel Matthew Raymer and North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley, who serves as the RNC’s general counsel, wrote in the letter, which was obtained by NBC News.
The dispute also threatens to make a mess of the state party's March 2 presidential caucuses, where most of Michigan's delegates to the national convention will be awarded. In their letter, Raymer and Whatley noted the urgent need for a resolution, given the "important implications for the presidential delegate selection process in Michigan."
Hoekstra welcomed the RNC's involvement and vowed to move “full steam ahead” in the role he says is rightfully his. Karamo’s team, meanwhile, responded to the letter with defiance. The impasse continues.
“To be clear, lawyers signing a letter does not communicate anything other than their opinion,” Dan Hartman, the general counsel for the Karamo-led wing of the state party, wrote Thursday in a statement to reporters. “Therefore, while the letter is authentic, I do not care because their opinion is irrelevant to any resolution.”
Hartman also accused the RNC of promoting “drama” as “part of the mission to remove” Karamo.
“In my opinion,” Hartman concluded, “this letter was politically motivated to try and further intimidate her and her team.”
Karamo, the GOP's losing candidate for Michigan secretary of state in 2022, has been under fire for months, facing criticism from party insiders and activists, including those who supported her campaign for chair. Her detractors believe that Karamo has failed to deliver on promises of transparency and reform and that poor financial and fundraising choices have led the party toward bankruptcy.
Aides to Karamo did not respond to a request to comment on this week's developments. In an interview this month with NBC News, Karamo described the criticism against her as an “attempted sabotage” by people she doesn’t trust.
“I will never shut out legitimate concerns,” Karamo said. “And how I define legitimate concerns — it’s, you know, people being honest, they’re not scheming, backstabbing. … I’m not interested in ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”
Hoekstra, a former congressman who served as ambassador to the Netherlands under then-President Donald Trump, was chosen at a meeting last week to lead the anti-Karamo faction. But the group does not have access to the state party’s bank accounts or property — something that Hoekstra hopes a lawsuit filed last week in Kent County will resolve.
While Karamo’s administration is still communicating through Michigan GOP accounts, emails from the rival Hoekstra team come from an “Official MI GOP” account via Gmail.
“The great thing is, these are all political folks, and they all know how to set up email accounts,” Hoekstra said of his renegade staff in an interview Wednesday. “And they all know how to set up email accounts, they’re setting up websites, other social media and those types of things — and we’re doing it relatively quickly. But we have to go and do that because we do not have access to the [state party’s] digital world or financial world.”
One of Hoekstra’s first orders of business was to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign after the former president’s victory Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary.
“With President Trump’s decisive win in New Hampshire, he is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party and we can start to focus our efforts on BEATING Joe Biden, rather than in-party fighting,” Hoekstra said in a statement his team emailed Wednesday morning.
“If we unify and deliver Michigan for Donald Trump, he will be the 47th president of the United States,” Hoekstra added. “That is the mission. As chairman of the Michigan GOP, I am putting together an operation that will do just that.”
Trump’s preference in the chair fight — if he has one — is not clear. The former president endorsed Karamo in her 2022 bid for secretary of state, but supported one of her rivals in the state party race last year. Hoekstra said another candidate at last week’s election for a new chair dropped out and backed him after hearing from someone in Trump’s political orbit. Trump campaign officials did not respond to questions about the dispute.
A recent Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll found Trump with an 8-point lead over Biden in a general election matchup in Michigan. But for weeks, Republicans in the state have openly worried that the intraparty discord will jeopardize not only Trump’s chances of winning the state, but also the party’s chances of winning an open U.S. Senate seat.
One veteran GOP operative involved in races there this year told NBC News this month that they were “basically just acting as if there’s no state party” and prepared to proceed without the institutional support that usually comes from such organizations. But news of Hoekstra’s emergence as a new party chair earned praise from those nervously watching the Karamo situation.
“Now here is to the MIGOP focusing on winning elections for Republicans,” Stu Sandler, a GOP consultant advising Senate candidate Sandy Pensler, posted on X. “Good riddance to @KristinaKaramo.”
Hoekstra said he has heard from a “tremendous amount” of party donors and grassroots activists who are eager to help him.
“We have to do we have to do in nine months what a party usually does over 18 months,” he said. “We need to be focusing on the infrastructure necessary to build the party, and we need to be working on fundraising. And the more time that we spend arguing with other Republicans, the more difficult those other goals become.”
